Although it is among the oldest of market institutions, the auction is ubiquitous in today's economy, used for everything from government procurement to selling advertising on the Internet to course assignment at MIT's Sloan School. Yet beyond the small number of economists who specialize in the subject, few people understand how auctions really work. This concise, accessible, and engaging book explains both the theory and the practice of auctions.

In this audiobook, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes - including "Leave Britney Alone", the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's "We Are the 99 Percent". She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users.

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.

Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: The union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

Award-winning science journalist and author Lynne McTaggart invites listeners to take part in the world's largest mind-over-matter experiment in The Intention Experiment. By thinking positively about life and consciousness, people can, in fact, change their lives.

Neural networks, the hypothalamus, and the secrets of a woman’s mind! You probably aren’t sure what a neural network is, you likely have no clue what a hypothalamus is, but I bet you are aching to get your hands on the last one, especially if you are a dude. Never fear my friends, for this book will teach you how neural networks operate and how they are used in medical diagnostics and Forex trading. You’ll learn what a hypothalamus is and how it works, tips for keeping it healthy along with six natural ways to improve its functioning capacity.

In this book, you can study things like neural networks and the hypothalamus, along with the woman’s brain, here are just a few of the many, many things this book sheds light on: What exactly is a neural network; how does a neural network function; how they’re used in medical diagnostics; how forex trading relates to it, and more; the anatomy of the hypothalamus and its function; tips on how to keep your hypothalamus healthy; six natural ways to increase its functioning capabilities; learn the various conditions and their signs that affect the hypothalamus, and more.

In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell and perceive time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel" - simulations of future and past events.

The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas: Gender is a social construct. Race is a social construct. Class is a function of privilege. The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in. It is not a story to be feared. But it is a story that needs telling.

How does the brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state.

Going deep into the studies of dyslexics and their strengths and weaknesses, the author of this book highlights some of the most overlooked aspects of the reading disability. He goes on to say that dyslexia is definitely hereditary and shows various examples and studies to back his statements. Then, he poses the question: “What is the reading gene?” in a less literal way. In the end, the author emphasizes on a number of tips teachers can take away to handle those with dyslexia better.

The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms.

It’s said that filling the observable universe with an infinite number of monkeys on infinite typewriters and letting them type for an infinite amount of time would eventually produce Shakespeare’s works. However, what would happen if we applied the infinite monkey theorem to computer programs capable of learning and evolution? Would a thousand such smart machines thrown together and allowed to evolve undisturbed produce a human mind or something much greater? Well, scientists decided to give it a go and see what happened.

Is everything connected? Can we sense what's happening to loved ones thousands of miles away? Why are we sometimes certain of a caller's identity the instant the phone rings? Do intuitive hunches contain information about future events? Is it possible to perceive without the use of the ordinary senses? Many people believe that such "psychic phenomena" are rare talents or divine gifts. Others don't believe they exist at all. But the latest scientific research shows that these phenomena are both real and widespread.